In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates the opening verse of Psalm 133:
How wonderful, how beautiful,
when brothers and sisters get along!
It can be easy to read that psalm and brush it aside thinking it would be easy for David’s army, a group of loyal, highly-skilled soldiers doing the Lord’s work, to get along.
In his book, Leap Over A Wall, Peterson paints a very different picture of this group that is both comforting and convicting.
He writes,
Those who came to him are described as “every one who was in distress, and every one who was in debt, and every one who was discontented” (I Sam. 22:2). This is the sociological profile of David’s congregation: people whose lives were characterized by debt, distress, and discontent. It isn’t what we would call the cream of the crop of Israelite society. More like dregs from the barrel. Misfits, all, it appears. The people who couldn’t make it in regular society. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts.
These are the people David lived with for that decade of wilderness years. They foraged together, ate together, prayed together, fought together. There’s nothing explicit in the text about the spirituality of David’s company – nothing that says they became a community of faith and searched out the ways in which God worked his salvation in their lives – but the context demands it. We know that David prayed; I think it’s safe to assume that he taught his companions to pray, surviving in hostile surroundings and realizing that God was with them, working out his sovereign purposes in them. That motley collection of unloved and unlovable people – the distressed, the debtors, the discontented – achieved a remarkable and high-spirited camaraderie, a morale explicitly noted in the summarizing retrospective of David’s company written later in I Chronicles 12.
The large context in which this story is placed – God working his salvation out among those who need to be saved – not only permits but requires that we see David’s morally and socially ragtag band as an embryonic holy people of God. We must stretch our imaginations to the horizons of God’s sovereignty and see that David’s company, even though made up of the distressed, the debtors, and the discontented, was made by God – a people defined not by where they came from or what they did but by what God did in and for them. This seems to be the sort of people that God commonly uses to form companies of believers, disciples, worshipers. Not all scholars are agreed on this, but it’s probable that the word Hebrew wasn’t in the first place an ethnic designation but originally referred to a social class of despised drifters and outcasts who existed on the margins of the Middle Eastern cultures. And it was these men and women, not the cultural and political sophisticates of Egypt and Assyria, who were elected to from the “people of God” through whom God would reveal his saving purposes.